Social media monitoring is high on everyone’s agenda. Technology companies have been quick to respond (they always are; they’re the guys who gave us CRM and Y2K, remember!). They’ve now introduced tools that do everything from capturing conversations to segmenting them by sentiment—negative, positive, neutral.
The way I see it, though, the real challenge for brands is not capturing conversations but doing something about and with them. This is not as simple as it sounds.
Social media conversations often relate to the [...]

Social media have helped corporations, retailers and small brands make a name for themselves and maintain sales during one of the toughest economic times ever. But it’s also had a significant impact on the entertainment industry, making unlikely stars and also highlighting flaws in some seemingly perfect icons.
YouTube is probably the best case study of how social media can create and deflate celebrity. Lonely Girl 15 was a realistic but fictional video docu-series that had everyone believing Lonely Girl’s life [...]

When I think back to the early days of the digital media era, I find that we spent far less time debating the meaning-of-the-medium-as-a-medium and more time actually doing stuff. Does anyone else think it strange that we have social media sites with 300 million members and yet there’s never a shortage of participants debating the role of the medium? Did everybody get burned so badly building their store on Second Life that they’re afraid to venture into the social [...]

Online marketers and social media influencers have come under the microscope after the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released guidelines on how they should disclose their working relationships in order not to misinform or falsely persuade consumers. (Here are some details about the guidelines.) It appeared that so-called mommy bloggers had been targeted as the main suspects for accepting bribes (e.g., money, products, free services) in exchange for positive postings.
Based, however, on my observation of the webinar called “Blog with Integrity,” [...]

There is more being written about social media than any other marketing topic today. And with good reason: Social media has turned out to be a powerful determinant of a brand’s success.
Before a company ventures into the social media arena, however, it pays to take a look at what others before them have done in the space. Recently, I did a study on the social media strategies of organisations and found that they were using them at four key levels:
1. [...]

This is the third in a series of three.
My last two posts addressed social media, present and future. The social media thought leaders we spoke with also had some notions about the social Web’s global impact:
George Gallate, global chairman, Euro RSCG 4D:
“Social media has made fundamental changes to the community. Huge effect on children all around the world.”

This is the second in a series of three.
In my last post, I shared some of what social media thought leaders have to say about the state of the social Web now. Here are their predictions for the future:
B.L. Ochman, president, Whatsnextonline.com:
“I think in the next five years, we’ll see a lot of companies get on the train or they’ll be left behind.… Companies will fall off the map when they refuse to be involved with what’s going on around [...]

This is the first in a series of three.
We just finished conducting one-on-one interviews with some of the brightest minds in the social Web. Here are some of their insights, which we shared with our general managers yesterday in Paris. Check in tomorrow for more of what these leaders have to say.
B.L. Ochman, president, Whatsnextonline.com:
“For big corporations, this stuff is still very scary…. Anyone who is a consultant must tackle fear.”
“A lot of companies should take their websites down, because [...]

Cause marketing is one of the biggest trends shaping our industry these days, right up there with social media. Can the two work together? Can social networking support social responsibility?
A growing chorus of advocates would say yes. (I count myself among them: I spearheaded Tweet to ReMIND, a Twitter-based fundraising effort for the Bob Woodruff Foundation that brought in more than $172,000 for helping wounded military personnel transition back into society.) USA Today reported earlier this year about a new [...]

You can have all the bandwidth in the world, a site loaded with bells and whistles, apps that run on every new platform—but that’s no guarantee of social media success. This point was brought home to me at the Internet Marketing Summit in London last week, during a presentation given by Andrew Gerrard, a social and digital media strategist at d-marketing.
The No. 1 social media tool companies should invest in is their people.
By now, we all know the buzzwords of [...]